New UK Pub on Best Practices in Community Engagement

The Local Government Association in the UK sponsors IDEA, the Improvement and Development Agency, a very active learning network for local government. In addition to an active website, they also produce high quality guides. One of their newest publications, Local Development Frameworks: Effective Community Involvement, provides a thoughtful guide to constructing a multi-layered community engagement process. The guide, which can be found here, includes a number of worksheets as well as an accompanying spreadsheet to support the design phase.

Their view of engagement is broad; as the guide puts it, “The term ‘engagement’ refers to more than just ‘consultation’. It extends the more traditional approaches, where questions and parameters tend to be restrictive, to include opportunities for the community to gain a greater understanding of pertinent issues and contribute towards finding solutions.” What I find particularly intriguing is that the guide supports the development of a mandatory description of the engagement process which is shared with residents and stakeholders prior to the beginning of the process, something that is rarely found in the states.